Evaluation of Extended CCSDS Reed-Solomon Codes for Bandwidth efficiency

The present CCSDS recommendation for Telemetry Channel Coding was originally written around twenty years ago. The appearance of the Turbo coding scheme has made an inclusion of this powerful scheme desirable, and thus it becomes natural also to perform a major rewriting of the other part of the recommendation. For that purpose we have investigated a number of topics: We give the performance of Reed-Solomon codes with less error-correcting capability than in the present recommendation, and we give suggestions for selection of the generator polynomial for such codes. We provide some comments on the recommendation aimed at improving the presentation in the recommendation. We comment on the selection of a pseudo-randomiser sequence in the recommendation and suggest an alternative with better properties. An alternative to higher rate Reed-Solomon codes is investigated by puncturing the convolutional codes. Finally, we present advantages and disadvantages by placing the frame synchronizer before and after the Viterbi decoder, and we suggest an option where the attached sync marker is not convolutionally encoded.